“Grace, you know your brother—”
“I heard the beginning of your conversation with my father.” She tried to button her sweater, then abandoned the effort. “That’s why I came out here. Fight or flight, you know.”
“You care about Linc very much,” Abigail said.
“Yes, I do.”
“Enough to lie for him when Chris asked you where he was?”
Grace lifted her chin, and Abigail could see the older woman’s self-control assert itself—could see glimpses, finally, of the intelligence and drive that had helped land her the State Department appointment. “What are you talking about?”
“I got pictures the other day, too. You told the police you never talked to Chris when he stopped up at your uncle’s house after I was attacked. But you did, didn’t you?”
“There’s a picture of us?”
“Yes.”
“I told the police I saw him. If the picture doesn’t show us actually talking—” But she stopped herself, then went on in a half whisper. “He asked me where Linc was.”
“What did you tell him, Grace?”
She looked down at her blue-red feet. “I told him Linc was at the old Garrison house foundation. That’s where I thought he was. I didn’t lie. Not to Chris.”
Something in her voice penetrated the wall of professionalism Abigail had tried to put up to steel herself—to give herself objectivity. She sat back on the bench, its wood warming in the midday sun. Bob O’Reilly had warned her to leave any questioning to the Maine CID detectives. And yet here she was.
“Linc wasn’t down at the foundation,” she said. “There was another picture in the packet on my doorstep. It shows him at the gate in your uncle’s yard. It was taken around the same time as the one of you and Chris.”
“Linc—” Grace seemed confused. “My brother was in the gardens?”
“Sneaking a martini.”
“But I thought he was…” She didn’t go on.
“Why did you think Linc was at the old Garrison foundation?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you know he was the burglar everyone was talking about that summer?”
“Suspected—I’ve never known it for a fact. I still don’t, no matter what Linc’s told anyone else.”
“My husband knew,” Abigail said, not making it a question—not wanting, she thought, to make it a question.
“He never said. But I assume he did know, and I assume he confronted Linc and gave him one more chance. And Linc—” Grace shrugged off her sweater and balled it up in one hand, turning back to her kayak. “I have to go.”
“Grace, Linc wasn’t the one who broke into my house and attacked me and stole my necklace. Chris knew that. I could see it in his face. He knew who’d done it, and he knew it wasn’t a troubled thirteen-year-old boy.”
“You sound so confident.”
“I’m not confident about much that happened that day, but about that—” She nodded. “Yeah. I’m confident. Chris wanted to know where your brother was to make sure he was safe. All this time, Grace, have you believed your brother killed Chris?”
She shook her head. “No. Never.”
Grace abandoned her thought and grabbed the line on her kayak, dragging the lightweight boat farther up onto the grass. She dropped it and tossed her sweater into the open cockpit, then threw her head back, staring into the sky as if she might see Chris’s ghost.
Finally, she turned to Abigail. “I just believed I sent your husband to his death.”
And Abigail knew what she was hearing in Grace’s voice now. She stood up, put a hand out to her. “Grace,” she said. “You were in love with him.”
But she pretended not to hear. She gave her kayak a little kick. “I’ll come back for you later,” she said to it, then squinted at Abigail. “I’m so glad you weren’t hurt any worse than you were yesterday. I know you’re very good at taking care of yourself, but I’d hate to see anything happen to you. We all would.”
She fled up the path through the roses.
Abigail didn’t follow her. Instead, she walked back into the water, the tide higher now, deeper. She spotted a bit of bright color that didn’t fit with the grays and browns of the bottom and reached one hand into the water, digging among rounded stones and rough sand until she freed it.
It was a sliver of purple seaglass, its edges rounded and softened by the salt water and sand. She rinsed it off and held it up to the sun, imagining it was from a bottle Chris had tossed into the sound as a boy. She could see him out in his grandfather’s boat, exploring the island’s nooks and crannies, pulling lobster traps from the depths, dreaming of becoming an FBI agent.
Had he ever dreamed of the woman he would marry?
She cupped the seaglass in her hand, then threw it as far out into the water as she could.
She would find out who killed him.